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Yes, a bit hypocritical to just lay the blame at IBM's feet too. The US has a long history of doing business with criminal regimes from banana republics, to the nazi's, to apartheid South Africa, to regimes like Saudi Arabia today.

While this is true to be fair the ones doing business with the Nazis were the German branch and from what I understand in Hitler's Germany you did what you were told or enjoy your nice trip to the concentration camp. His regime weren't real tolerant of being told no, just look at how the German commanders captured (and secretly recorded0 by the Brits were all in agreement that attacking Russia was a majorly BAD idea, but none had the guts to walk up to the Fuhrer and tell him that.

As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

As someone who lived through that time allow me to say thank you IBM, thank you for the 5150 [wikipedia.org] and for being stupid enough to publish specs for everything back then which made building add ons easy. today it would be proprietary as hell and innovation would be right out the window, but thanks to IBM we don't have to throw everything out when we want to upgrade for performance. Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, nothing talked to each other, the drives for A wouldn't work on B, hell even computers by the same company often had incompatible peripherals. As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20 frankly it was a royal PITA.

Now thanks to IBM you can buy AMD, Intel or Via, add more RAM or even a new box from a different OEM, it really doesn't matter as it all "just works". Thanks to the hardware being open we were able to route around the douches, like Compaq and their "special RAM", and now it doesn't matter what hardware or even OS you get, your printer still plugs in, you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots, it all is basically compatible. And frankly that is a GOOD thing. Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX, to where we could easily repair or upgrade that would be heaven. Sadly it looks like proprietary in a box will stay in mobile land, which means designed for the dump since third parties can't make cheap parts. Damned shame but thank you IBM for at least giving us one platform that is easy to deal with.

The "German branch" of IBM? Buddy, there are no "branches" in a megacorporation. You do what the head honchos at the main corporate headquarters say, or you're out of a job. Look, I know that IBM wasn't the only company to do business with the Nazis, but IBM had more inside information on the goals of the Nazis than anyone else. Tracking and segregating the Jewish population is directly credited to IBM, and quite properly so. The Nazis TOLD IBM what they wanted, and IBM delivered. There is very litt

All IBM has to do to corroborate your hypothesis is to open up their archives, and show through written communication that the international leadership was indeed side-stepped by the SA goons. IBM hasn't opened up these archives, unlike most other companies involved with the Nazis, therefore I highly doubt that the head-honchos in New York at the time were innocent.

Agree with the first responder. There are memos proving beyond a doubt that Thomas J. Watson himself was not only informed about what was going on, but himself helped plan it and actively engaged in doing business with the Nazis.

Part of that business was supplying machines that kept track of concentration camp prisoners via punch card.

Was IBM all bad? No. But was it some bad, especially during the Nazi Germany days? Hell, yes! The historical record has proven it beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, Watson and IBM were not the only corporate or finance bigwigs who did that kind of thing at the time, but do it they definitely did.

"... as if we all didn't already know the story. What some of those people did 70 years ago was pretty awful."

I agree. But I honestly think that many people did NOT know that story. I don't think they're all trolling.

The 20th century (and probably earlier) history of politics in the United States is chock full of politicians and industrialists playing both sides of the fence. Yes, it has most definitely been pretty awful. And no, it hasn't stopped.

Hell look at how many mainstream churches and leaders in the late 40s through early 60s were finding bible passages and any other excuse on why "them niggers need to be kept in their place"? if you dig back far enough in ANY large business you are gonna find something distasteful or even monstrous, because frankly times have changed by leaps and bounds in the last 100 years.

People forget that Nazi eugenics? Came from right here in the USA. We were sterilizing undesirables long before Hitler had the thought

Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?

Of course not, any more than anybody runs Intel 8088 chips anymore, uses an ISA expansion bus, Shugart disc interfaces etc. I even believe that modern systems can have more than 640K of RAM...

The 6502 might not have had any official surviving children (ISTR there was a 16-bit variant used in the Apple II GS), but its pretty well documented that it was a major influence [wikipedia.org] on the design of the ARM.

Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. I don't think the fact that these have legacy backwards-compatibility with the 8088 was a major influence on Apple's decision to switch. That has more to do with IBM and Motorola's failure to manufacture a mobile version of the PPC G5, at a time when Apple was doing rather well with non-Intel based machines...

As someone who lived through that time

You must have been very, very drunk, because you don't remember it very well.

Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, [snip] As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20

Which is why, pre-PC, serious commercial microcomputer users tended to use one of the many CP/M-based systems rather than VIC20s, to the extent that there were even kludges available to run CP/M on Trash-80s and Apple IIs (the latter requiring a Z80 system on an expansion card). This is what IBM-lovers like to airbrush out of history because the "revolutionary" IBM PC was really just a "me too" CP/M-86 machine (MS-DOS/PC-DOS being, effectively, a clone of CP/M).

Now thanks to the failure of the IBM PS/2 and MicroChannel architecture you can buy...

There, put that right for you.

your printer still plugs in,

Nice to know that IBM invented the Centronics and RS232 interfaces, and that anybody who remembers using those on non-IBM computers is delusional.

you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots

You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.

Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX

If only people didn't want their mobiles to be slim, and light, and, well, mobile...

You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.

Indeed, IBM actually went the opposite direction with the PS/2, and you had to have configuration floppies to install MCA cards even for use under DOS. The only cool thing about the hardware I messed with while working for the county of santa cruz HRA as a youngun was the PS/2 model 70, I'd mess with one of those even today. Probably no point though. When I was leaving we were just getting 486SLC PS/Valuepoints... I mean, seriously?

And yet, that would be the same PS/2 that gave us the mini-DIN connector in the context of connecting keyboards and mice, which is still found on many modern desktops and docking stations. A 20+ year old IBM Model M keyboard for those old systems can still be plugged-in to many modern computers, well over a decade after the superior USB interface came along.

And, the 3.5" floppy (the Apple Mac had already gone that way, but you could argue that they used a different, variable speed format).

So far, the "more closed" PS/2 is looking more influential (in terms of features that even turn up in modern non-PC systems) than the "open" (on paper) original PC.:-)

But, seriously, nobody is trying to claim that the IBM PC was not massively influential or didn't dominate the market for years - the nonsense is the claim that it was the "first true personal computer". It w

IBM was the first computer manufacturer that brought all the elements together,

Back in reality, IBM was the computer manufacturer with a monopolistic track record that ignored PCs for years, then panicked and brought-out a "me too" system running a clone of the already-industry-standard CP/M with a kludgey not-quite-true 16-bit processor. They then used their industry muscle to take over the corporate microcomputing market (and extinguish the previous CP/M practice of designing software to be easily patched to run on diverse systems) - then got their underpants pulled up over their h

Uhh they helped them put people into categories for eugenics purposes just like they did here in the USA or did you forget that we were sterilizing undesirables and putting out books on how negroid and mongoloid features were proof they were inferior to white races?

As someone who actually got to hear about liberating one of the polish camps from my grandfather who was there frankly nobody believed the stories until we actually got to the first camps, which is why Patton and Ike made the scenes be recorded and shuffled the townspeople of the nearby villages through the camps to witness the horror. We thought the stories were just so much bullshit just as the stories being spread by Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally, which had the Nazis slaughtering the Americans in huge numbers while kicking the Russian ass.

So while hindsight is 20/20 most people at the time thought it would be used for sterilization (not nice either, but what we in the USA were doing) not for systemic slaughter. Sadly there are no true good guys with clean hands in that war, you had the Russians and the rape of Berlin as well as mass slaughter of German POWs, the rape of Nanking by the japs as well as experimenting on prisoners (which we let them get away with in return for the data) and you had the USA doing terror bombings as well as two atomics on a country that frankly had had it and was no longer able to put up any real defense.

Despite all the "America Fuck yeah!" attached to that war the simple fact is total war is a brutal thing but we were a little more naive back then and as my grandfather said "If I wouldn't have seen the cattle cars with my own eyes I would have called you a liar." because until they got to the camps they just hadn't seen any indication that the truth wasn't they had sent the Jews east, which is what everyone believed at the time.

I'm not exactly IBM's biggest fan (having to hammer on 370-series mainframes made me quite the IBM-hater for awhile), but to say that IBM automated the Nazis would be akin to saying that {insert item here} helped to {insert what that item does} the Nazis.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that WWII Germany had light bulbs, motion pictures, aircraft, NCR calculators (the old mechanical kind), and lots of other things pioneered by American individuals and companies. I'm also willing to bet that many of them were used directly in facilitating the Holocaust as well.

Hell, Henry Ford was an open admirer of Hitler's policies before (and even in the pre-US stages of) WWII, and an unabashed anti-semite... does that make the Ford Mustang a Nazimobile?

They weren't just Nazi sympathizers, they didn't just make general-purpose tools and end up having the Nazis use them, they worked with them extensively in a strategic alliance. They talked to them about what they wanted to get done, they helped them do it efficiently, and they put effort into hiding their role.

In particular, they were instrumental in accomplishing the identification of members of targeted ethnic groups, while being fully aware of the Nazi party's intent to persecute them. They provided the information infrastructure necessary to round up all of the jews and gypsies, knowing at the very least that they were to be rounded up.

In particular, they were instrumental in accomplishing the identification of members of targeted ethnic groups, while being fully aware of the Nazi party's intent to persecute them. They provided the information infrastructure necessary to round up all of the jews and gypsies, knowing at the very least that they were to be rounded up.

Exactly! It was a now-classic consulting scenario: the business (e.g, Nazi Germany) buys a big shiny piece of hardware, and with it they get some IBM consultants to customize it. The business comes up with its business rules, e.g, every generation the Jewishness halves if a Jew marries a non-Jew, anyone who is at least 1/64th Jewish is considered a Jew, and here's some census data that says who has claimed to be a Jew up until the current moment who has married whom (gotta ferret out those crypto-Jews, sneaky though they are), and we want names and addresses out of it. Then the consultants go hmm okay that'll be $lots and implement the system.

It would have absolutely impossible for IBM's consultant programmers to have worked on this project without realizing that Hitler would be using this information to round up citizens based on their ethnicity. I can totally accept that the consultants didn't realize that the Jews would be killed (it's hard to believe that people are going to die as a result of your work, honestly), but there was no way for them to have done this without realizing that, you know, the names and addresses are popping out of our tabulating machine and going straight to the Gestapo who all run out waving truncheons.

Ford is a warning form history about wealthy networks, generational trusts and what they can print in their masters image.
IBM is interesting too, they have records from that era but how much have historians seen;)
The next question is what did the people who sat in on this in the 1940's as younger staff fund in the 1950's, 60's... as more senior staff and who was groomed to take their place?
Final solutions for a small planet?

IBM supplied Germany with machines and intelligence during the war, with full knowledge of Thomas Watson himself. Which at the time, if he were caught, would probably have gotten him charges of treason and aiding and abetting the enemy, at the very least.

There is strong physical evidence, including memos, invoices, and receipts, indicating that IBM (and I mean the US offices, not just some German branch) actively, during the war, supplied the Nazis with machines that were used to keep track of prisoners at concentration camps, and instruction on how to use them.

The truth about lulz : Edwin Black, an author holed up in his basement, spending years and years researching the details for a book, reading thousands of documents and talking with hundreds of people, will achieve far more lulz, in the long run, than hacking a website.

Black's book came out circa 2001. That is 10 years ago, and people still talk about it. And we still wait for IBM to open their archives.

Killed a lot fewer people. 12 million killed in death camps vs. a couple hundred thousand by the two bombs. But then, nobody seems to cry about the fire bombing of Japanese cities, which killed far more people, mostly civilians.

Besides, with the atomic bombs, it's not so simple. I think the deciding factor was that only 1.2% of soldiers at Iwo Jima surrendered, the rest fought to their deaths in a bitter battle, in the name of their emperor. If it came to that on the Japanese islands, the country and pe

And to reply to Cringley's comments on identity theft, if everyone put their foot down and *forced service providers to stop using unchangeable, researchable authenticators like SSNs and Maiden names, all of that problem would dry up in a heart beat.

Hmm, I sold personal computers for around 5 years before IBM rolled their first PC out, so I guess all the people that bought them will have to look back in embarrassment now that its been revealed that those really werent either personal or computers. Imsai, Altair, Poly, Xitan, Alpha Micro...all came long before IBM rolled anything out the door.
Plus we thought the IBM PC was lousy. It had a weird keyboard layout and it was slow. Real expensive compared to other alternatives of the day. You could get a much faster cpu with more memory and a larger capacity floppy drive for half the price.

It has the all the main personal computing features we associate with pre-Macintosh/Lisa systems, like a keyboard, CRT, local storage and user programmability. It probably predates the systems you sold by a year or two.

From History Of Computing Project [thocp.net]: "The company established what was then called the Entry Systems Division, located in Boca Raton, Florida, to develop the new system. This small group consisted of 12 engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge; the team's chief designer was Lewis Eggebrecht. The division developed IBM's first real PC. (IBM considered the 5100 system, developed in 1975, to be an intelligent programmable terminal rather than a genuine computer, even though it truly was a comp

That particular price point for the 5100 was set by the marketing department, because they didn't want it to compete against their mainframe business. It could have been sold for substantially less, and did include a number of features that was well ahead of its time.

Simply put, it was never given the chance to actually be a real product because IBM didn't want it to be something an ordinary consumer could ever possibly purchase. About the only people permitted to even buy this computer were existing cust

I remember a computer trade journal article that came out about the same time the IBM PC was released, where they went through the parts list of the items that went into the original IBM PC. After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".

That wasn't entirely fair as there were some IBM engineers who had to piece the components together and sort of did help design the motherboard, but otherwise not a single major component inside of that computer was even made by IBM. Even that process of designing the PC motherboard was going way outside of the normal IBM development cycle process and only when a completed motherboard was presented to IBM management that anything resembling a formal project to make the IBM PC a reality was initiated.

What the letters "IBM" did do to the personal computer industry, however, was to legitimize the industry so far as to give conservative business executives an excuse to buy the equipment. Before they weren't about to buy a beige computer from a bunch of hippies in California or a video game console that also happened to do some computing on the side. Before IBM, the personal computer industry was mainly hackers and hobbyists. Afterward, the personal computer went mainstream into homes and medium-sized businesses.

After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".

100% true, of course. The optional hard disks were made by Seagate (hence the legacy of the ST01 controller), the floppy drives were made by Toshiba or Chinon or somebody like that. The processor came from Intel. The optional printer was made by Epson. The mother

The original keyboard for the IBM PC was a pure piece of garbage. As a matter of fact, one of the early accessories that many PC buyers purchased was a keyboard from 3rd party developers, where important keys like the "enter key" was enlarged, along with the shift keys and a spacebar that actually felt right.

Re-read that article again, to realize how many people hated the thing. I hated it and told my professors at the time.... where they cringed in disbelief that IBM could produce such a piece of crap.

I completely disagree. The model F IBM-XT keyboard was one of the best keyboards I've had the pleasure to use, the tactile feeling is something I'll never forget. In fact, when I ditched the XT (bad move, it'd now be worth a bit as a collectible) I kept the keyboard and I still have it to this day. I took it into work (a school) a year or so ago for a teacher to use in their lesson, showing the evolution of hardware and everyone who tried it was amazed at how good it felt. It makes modern membrane keyboards

It seems to me that it's pretty clear that the speaker in the video is saying that that IBM invented the Personal Computer (upper case), not the personal computer, lower case. When you watch the video, the screen is showing the case where it says "IBM Personal Computer". And I think that's worth talking about, since the majority of toeday's personal computers (both windows & mac) can trace its roots back to this architecture.

These were all the first personal computers. IBM had nothing to do with any of it.

IBM's only claim to fame is that their hardware specs allowed others to make similar systems.. so the "IBM PC" became manufacturable by many companies... and as a result... it beat out the proprietary hardware guys.

IBM has invented many things, but the personal computer is nothing they invented.

Some of these computers are not what we now consider personal computers, or of 1980+ vintage, The TRS-80. The TRS 80 and Apple ][ are example of mid-to-late-70 computers that are identifiable as what most would call personal computers, that is general purpose assembled machines. My memory of the Commodore Pet annd the early atari machines were that they did not do all that much.

The early IBM machines were more mini computers rather than personal computers. Tandy also had a number of computer in this cla

Well, yeah. Thanks to Phoenix, the IBM PC compatible market opened up, and all the technical superior microcomputers (lacking clones) were doomed. (I'm aware of the other clones before Phoenix, when each manufacturer did their own reverse-engineering and built their own BIOS -- I assume you're referring to Phoenix's commercially available BIOS, and if not, I think you should be.)

But does IBM deserve any credit for that? They fought tooth and nail against it. The main reason IBM'

Just like Columbus did not actually discover America, IBM did not invent the personal computer. However, just like Columbus for all intents and purposes put America on the map, IBM did deliver the PC to the world in a way that no other did (or could) at the time.

But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Va

The answer is murky and it depends upon how you define a personal computer. If you're talking about computers in the home, then it was probably the Apple/Commodore/Tandy triad who deserves credit. If you are talking about a standalone desktop computer, it looks like the IBM 5100 is a runner (1975). Then, of course, there are all of the people who include hobbiest machines.

I had the chance to play with a couple of 9845s in college in the early 80s, and they were definitely superior to the original PC. Their tape drives might have been a bit slower, but not enough to make a difference (maybe 2s to save a file vs. 1s). And their display and graphics library were far superior, not to mention the fact that the ones I used had a bit-mapped thermal printer that could print anything on the display. To get anything comparable on a PC was practically impossible ($-wise) until the E

During a speech at work about 10 years ago, my boss started talking about innovation and how one day, out of their garage, two young engineers invented the IBM personal computer. I then corrected him but he just brushed us off. I lost all respect for this fella and transferred to another department. I still love to point out his mistake.

I looked at Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore, and some S100 stuff at several local computers stores. Apple II required constant hacking and had severe glitches unless lots of extra money was spent on a CP/M card -- unless all you wanted to do was play games. CP/M-S100 boxes were business- and hacker-only. Commodore PET had a calculator-button keyboard and a shape only Wonder Woman could love (IRA?). Radio Shack Trash-80 Model 1 came as a complete system in a box, for a reasonable price (about 1/2 Apple's), w

In 1977 my college roommate had a TRS-80, with the expansion rack holding a bunch of cards... I don't even remember now what they all were but one was a modem which came with some pretty decent software at the time. We set the computer up to answer the phone after so many rings, with a computer-generated voice saying "We are not able to come to the phone right now, please leave a message". It was great, for when it was. Of course regular answering machines with tape were already common, but they weren't com

Having been there, I can attest to the fact that IBM's PC did indeed legitimize the personal computer for not only businesses, but later for home users who, having used IBM PCs at work, wanted a familiar computer at home as well.

Back then, the mantra in business was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", and that "magical pixie dust" settled onto the IBM PC as well... and later, with the advent of Compaq, and its "clean room" reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS, opened the door for all of the IBM PC compatible clones that came later, with BIOS' made by AMI, Phoenix and Award, and together they not only legitimized the PC market for business, but standardized it and the home personal computer market as well, while driving down prices as third-party manufacturers created computers based around them.

Hell, I was running a home LAN with IBM XT and AT clones, some booting from diskette [1], with an AT clone server running NetWare v2.0a [wikipedia.org] (with a Seagate ST-4096 80MB MFM HD [2]), using ARCNET [wikipedia.org][3], back in 1988. Being able to centralized my programs, data, and share a printer was a HUGE thing for me, and for my customers as well.

Later, I upgraded my server to an 80386 clone, running NetWare v3, but still kept the 80 MB HD, and it was rock-solid, and the most reliable server I've ever had at home.

Now, you could say that it was all crude, and certainly it was, by today's standards... but I installed hundreds of LANs for small/medium-sized businesses back then, and the benefit they all gained was very real.

NONE of the latter would have been possible without IBM's PC: It not only standardized the hardware and bus, but standardized the client OS as well, which resulted in an explosion of development of not only business applications, but games, and software in general as well.

So, yeah, IBM didn't invent the "PC", and there's more than a little historical revisionism going on... but, to dismiss their effect on personal computing as "just" making it mainstream for business does them disservice as well.

Regards,

dj

[1] Hard drives were very expensive back then, so it was cheaper to use one large, expensive HD in a file server, and boot the workstations from diskette... and keep a box of backup boot diskettes on hand, just in case *grin*

[2] Seagate's ST-4096 was a state-of-the-art HD then: With 28ms average access speeds, capable of running at 1 to 1 interleave, it was blisteringly fast, and very reliable. Not to mention the fact that 80MB was "Huge tracts of storage"... when I installed one a customer, long before I could afford one myself, I asked him "So, what are you going to do with so much storage?" His answer? "Anything I want" *grin*.

[3] We used ARCNET for our customers, because the NICs were FAR less expensive than Ethernet NICs. We used SMC's NICs, until Thomas-Conrad came along, and beat them not only in price, but performance - T-C's ARCNET NICs used less upper memory in enhanced mode (4K vs. 16K or 32K as I recall), and their drivers were a LOT more efficient/faster.. later, they sold a "Universal Turbo" ARCNET NIC driver that worked with any ARCNET NIC, but made their NICs a LOT faster, and that was HUGE, too, from a management perspective: We only had to use one driver, regardless of NIC manufacturer.

Back in the pre-Ethernet switch days, ARCNET also performed a lot better under load than Ethernet with the same node count per network segment, despite "only" running at 2.5Mbps vs. Ethernet's theoretical 10Mbps...and it scaled deterministically as well. In addition, ARCNET over RG-62/U coax could be run 3000 feet, active port to active port, which helped minimize the number of active hubs needed, and offered FAR more flexibility in the real world.

[4] This footnote has no referral - but I suppose that this is where I should say "You damn kids get off my lawn!" *grin*

Was a student when they were just gaining a foothold. I remember one grizzly bastard prof talking about how this PC + the just released Lotus 123 was going to put the IS group in its place.At the time, IS departments ruled the roost, and anyone that wanted a customized view of their own data either waited an eternity for them to do a 5 minute RPG job, or had to have cum running out of their nose to get it when they needed it.

The PC changed all of that - suddenly IS lost its gatekeeper status on the data; a

As someone who was a sysadmin for a big company in '89, I can say that while your equipment might not have been brand new, it was upper-tier and expensive.

I remember getting a replacement for a borked 20MB hard drive from Dell for $400, and while I was outraged at the price, it was really only about 30% higher than the going market rate at the time. 80 MB drives were out of our office's price range, around 40MB being what we considered "affordable".

Other clones copying the IBM PC helped a lot too, to the the point that almost all x86 processors are paired with a chipset that is software-compatible with the core hardware the IBM PC had and a IBM PC compatible BIOS, the result being often called the "PC". Even Apple have switched to x86 and use the same chipsets as "PCs", one of the reasons why IMO the "PC" vs "Mac" comparison is nonsense nowadays.

The Apple II was plastic, toylike and very expensive for what you got. (You might as well have bought a TRS-80 and saved yourself a good chunk of change.)

The IBM PC was also expensive, but had top quality hardware similar to their mainframe terminals, including: a substantial steel chassis and case, a crisp monochrome monitor that you could actually work with all day without going blind, and one of the best keyboards ever made. It was a serious personal computer that PHBs felt comfortable buying for their b

"The Apple II was plastic, toylike and very expensive for what you got. (You might as well have bought a TRS-80 and saved yourself a good chunk of change.)"

The original TRS80 was only black and white - the Apple ][ had color

Actually I had an Apple ][+ as my 3rd computer - The first was a TRS80and the second was a Compucolor II it had 8 colors, 128x 128 pixel graphics, 32 KB ram and a 117 key keyboard. Unfortunately it had hardly any software.

Having owned both an Apple//+ and an IBM PC-1 I feel I must comment on this post. The Apple did not feel flimsy. The Commodore 64 felt flimsy. Amusingly, many C64s are still working after obscene quantities of abuse. There's a lot of computer in that box, too; a friend of mine added an ISA slot to one and planted a mono text card in it for use in a cafe terminal, for example. IIRC he added an XT keyboard interface as well. Maybe that was a 128, I don't recall at this late date. The Apple had a fantastic ca

sorry no, there were personal computers before the PC, but there was no PC before the PC, if anyone gets credit for ushering in the personal computer age its Apple, they were on their 3rd edition and had market IBM wanted by the time IBM wanted it and joined in

Apple was using the term "Personal Computer" from the advent of the Apple ][ in 1977. IBM's trademark was the "IBM PC" -- remember the Charlie Chaplin adverts? So, no, sorry, IBM can't even claim that.

Actually, there was a store in Bloomington, Indiana called The Data Domain [elinks.us] which claimed to use the term Personal Computer in advertising first. The guy who owned the Data Domain apparently talked to Steve Jobs directly on the phone to sell the Apple I.

I used to hang out at The Personal Computer Place in Mesa, AZ. I assembled a few SWTP 6800 systems, an IMSAI, and I think an ALTAIR for the owner who sold both kits and the assembled products. That was 5th grade, so must have been 1977. I recall him getting his first Apple II, it was awesome.

You must have a small refrigerator. The early PDPs were huge, but we had the PDP8E well before the PC came along and it wasn't really much bigger than a full-sized tower PC. (I'm qualified to repair them, although I'm a bit rusty...)

IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.

The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'.If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.

From wikipedia [wikipedia.org] : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"

Your ignorance is astounding. There were many complete assembled computer systems sold in the 70s, used in small business and in homes. Even the fully assembled Osburne was introduced five months before the IBM PC

There was the IBM 5100 [wikipedia.org] computer, which was an amazing piece of hardware. It very likely could have been the genesis of personal computers.... had IBM any sort of vision and if their marketing department wasn't so paranoid about the concept to let it out of the laboratory.

One of the amazing things about this little microcomputer was the fact that it could emulate some of the mainframe computers then in use at the time and even could in theory run some of software running on those mainframes as native binari

Cringely isn't even a real person, it's just a pseudonym for an InfoWorld column Mark Stephens (among others) wrote for in the early 90's.

I can't even believe people still reference, let along read, this guy. One of his most famous quotes (after having been caught lying about claiming he had Ph.D. from Stanford): "a new fact has now become painfully clear to me: you don't say you have the Ph.D unless you really have the Ph.D." Really, he had to "learn" that fact? Wonder how many other "facts" he's learn

In his defense, he had done all the work, but he hadn't gone through with the paperwork -- but this is just from memory.

I never bothered to finish my studies, either. I don't go around claiming to have gotten degrees that I don't have, but I can understand how one might feel entitled to a degree that one technically doesn't own, because of bureaucracy and/or circumstance. Obviously, the problem is the "entitled" aspect, and that's why I don't do what he did.

No, he had "taken all the coursework". The difference between "taken all the coursework" and "finished your dissertation" can be YEARS. He did what a lot of people who take the course but don't do a dissertation did - he accepted a masters and left. Unfortunately he then decided to lie about it...